Crypto, AI and the Permanent Underclass | The Breakdown

Some say we have two, three, maybe five years tops before AI makes a whole lot of us obsolete, creating a permanent underclass of laid off white collar workers who can no longer compete with LLMs like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini. If you do believe that, then your options are limited considering the time pressure. Options range from achieving sudden fame by maybe starting a podcast, to pivoting to shipping slop to stay ahead of whatever competition is left by this point. That's the good stuff. Or better yet, gamble your way out of the new lumpenproletariat on decentralized meme coin perps or leveraged prediction markets. Crypto is seen as one of a tiny number of escape routes from the impending AI workpocalypse, large array of different teams, projects, and alliances across crypto all working to channel the AI hype into their own corners of the market, this episode will instead be looking beyond compute marketplaces and GPU flywheels and instead get to the very heart of what we're all doing here, hunting exposure to new primitives that really will free us from the permanent underclass. I'm your host David Kinellis, and this is the breakdown. Let's get to it. Nothing said on the breakdown is a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are opinions, not financial advice. Hosts and guests may hold positions in the company's funds or projects discussed. Before we jump in, I just wanna give a quick shout out to BlockWorks Lightspeed IR. It's a brand new institutional grade investor relations platform built with the Solana Foundation to bring real signal to the Solana ecosystem. High fidelity, on chain data, serious research, ecosystem intel, all in one place. If you're allocating, building, or issuing, this is the edge. Check it out at lifespeed.vip. First, let's drill down on exactly what makes crypto different from tech, fintech, and even the Internet itself. What sets crypto apart is how quickly new primitives can go from discovery to investable implementations of those primitives. Here's what I mean by primitive. These are foundational building blocks on which more complex things can be built. There are primitives for all sorts of industries and technologies. There are software primitives, integers, characters, bytes, and so on. Same goes for hardware with its primitives like logic gates and transistors. All types of software can be built using the fundamental ingredients like bytes and integers, just like all types of computer hardware can be made using logic gates and transistors. In traditional finance, financial primitives might be contracts. Every legitimate business relationship requires contracts, also debt, with all of the lending, bond, and credit markets built on top of the foundational building block of debt. Equity would be another. Without ownership states in productive companies, there would be no stock markets. Likewise, all of commerce assumes that there is a currency that can be used as a …